Welcome Robert. This is the first time I've read anything that you've written.
Are you related to Simon Rattle? If I could walk around that circle that you cut across I would be appreciative. It helps to struggle with expressing these things in more than one way. For me anyway. Consider Pete's comment of that problem of the retention of wealth in the upper 1,2,3,4 or even five percent of a population as a dangerous and viral issue for a society. A comment that I can agree with. However, does that mean that we in essence "kill the off" or "tax them into oblivion?" I think the latter is, in their minds, a version of the former and they equate taxes with "stealing" and "murder." Either way, the use of violent metaphors in either camp is ridiculous and beneath their intelligence as members of a civilized society IMHO. Just look at the extremes of verbiage coming out of the foundations of modern Republicanism today and of the Left in the past. Yes I remember the nonsense in Chicago in the 1960s that eventually gave America a mercenary military with a considerable potential for mischief in spite of their magnificence. Both sides love collectives but the right calls them corporations and the left calls them cooperatives. The potential mischief is always greater where there is more capital to spend. Today's corporate image is of "worthy individuals" protecting themselves against the "unwashed masses." The only thing that makes the military reasonable in such a situation is that they are basically from the middle and lower classes and would presumably resist corporate use of the military should such tyranny arise. But it's still a question. The same corporate sentiment comes from the non-Hispanic, non-Jewish religious side of the Supreme Court. There is a remarkable consistency within the assumptions of the non-Hispanic, non-Jewish, Irish, Baltic and Italian Roman Catholics on the current court compared to the Hispanic and the Jewish members of the court. (There is no significant Protestant or any other religious assumption on this court.) We are watching an in house battle between groups who have been here before and still mouth the same old stories against one another while we all wonder what will become of us in their universe. A couple of years ago there was a mass vandalism against our religious ceremonial grounds around the country. Nothing was said. Why? After the Patriot Act was put in place it became convenient to put American Indian organizers into jail without habeas corpus and in a situation reminiscent of the not to distant past. I personally knew an organizer who disappeared for several months and came back with more than a little PTSD from the treatment. If he was any other religion including Muslim there would have been outcry but the Native population "sucked it up." We remembered when people were put in jail for praying and no one knew what had happened to them until they were released years later to families who believed they had died. This battle has scars that we carry into the present as we watch this court. The message is clear. Don't make waves. It's not a new message by any means. The so called Evangelicals have no representation on this court whatsoever. In fact both Kansas conservative Governor Brownback and Newt Gingrich are converts to the conservative Roman Catholic religious views following on the heels of the sole black member of the court who is also a part of that religious assumption after going to parochial school on a "scholarship" that weaned him from his African American upbringing. It's funny how Wikipedia claims that both African American Justices had similar backgrounds. Sort of like Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I guess. Historically Baptists are Libertarian. Check the description of Ana-Baptist in any general Encyclopedia of Religion. Then what is this thing about Libertarian Roman Catholics? Catholics assumptions aren't Libertarians by any stretch of the imagination. They are authoritarians and ecclesiastics not "local church hegemonies" like the Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists etc. Watching this Supreme Court argue personal freedom is a strange experience. Catholics can certainly be local and liberal just as Hispanics can be conservative and authoritarian but the core values of Libertarianism espoused by the great English libertarians like the Art theorist Sir Herbert Read or the educator A.S. Neil and his Summerhill schools are about as far from any kind of Catholic Education that I've seen and I've taught in a few over the fifty years of my teaching. I admire the beauty of Roman Catholic countries, churches and music but Libertarianism would have never done any of those things. It took a strong central church government to create that Cathedral in Siena. Look at the American Cathedrals and compare them to something as basic as the baptistery room in Siena. That was serious capital rich authority. It's not surprising that the beauty of the "Red Triangle" in Italy is filled with citizens that will report a neighbor for the wrong color of window shades to the town council. Aesthetics has been a part of the Catholic religion for a thousand years and just because they have communist mayors now doesn't make them lose their sense of beauty and pride in their towns. If anything it makes them more observant. Libertarians they are definitely NOT when it comes to the aesthetics of their collective environment. Ron and Rand Paul would be miserable. They prefer Texas and Kentucky. I feel that the problem of Libertarian thought here is not truly being understood. Libertarians are hyper individuals who believe the complete personal freedom of the individual and the right of individuals to form corporate bodies, i.e. their own churches, companies etc. But they do not believe those bodies have the right to remove anyone else's freedom either. Some corporate bodies are built on sin, like Banks or Taverns for example. Christian Libertarians don't like usury and they encourage people not to run up their own debt or the government's but they are not against banks even though the banks are the method by which people create the havoc and even death in their universe. You should remember that Ron Paul is the one who put out the DVD about the evil at the roots of the Federal Reserve System. Although he defends everyone's right to their wealth, he does not defend their being evil in gathering power to create an authoritarian environment to further the agendas of their wealth over the rights of anyone else. It was not that the wealthy formed the Federal Reserve but that they did so secretly that pisses him off. Generally Libertarians are not for using usury as an economic tool. They don't borrow easily. I know because I have a family full of them both on the European and the Cherokee side. But what they won't do is ban usury, even though they are against it. To do so would be an egregious sin against their personal freedom. That's where the abortion issue becomes really sticky and the Roman Catholic view on birth control and control in general has seeped into both the non hierarchical churches and the Republican Party. Both abortion and birth control have served as a doorway into evangelism from the ecclesiastical side. Most pure libertarians feel the same way about, abortion, birth control, drugs and homosexual rights to marriage vows. They may even believe that Gays are deviant and Blacks are slovenly, that abortion is infanticide and that birth control is anti "God" but they still don't believe that anyone should be required NOT to live anyplace that they can afford or that any of these things should be a matter of legislation. They should be a matter of personal morality fomented by their choice of religion or secular system of ethics. Knowing the ethical issues on abortion from a Jewish religious perspective, there was nothing more strange than listening to some of the Commentary and New Criterion Magazine writers defending Roman Catholic birth control theology when they were definitely not within their own traditions and assumptions on such matters. Sometimes the Western processes of "Separation and Individuation" require very strange psychological twists in order for a person to "become." Prejudice and stereotypical provinciality is not a virus that libertarians disavow, but personal freedom means that they won't abridge another person's freedom unless it is an actual issue of assault. You can quibble about what assault means and that's where both father and son Pauls become retentive and grow their internal toxicity, but I've seen some brilliant very liberal academics defend both father and son just as they defend von Mises and von Hayek in spite of some glaring practical problems in their thinking. (Being an artist and not an economist, I won't take that up unless the economists on the list, punt.) I don't really have time to argue about those two that I consider to be two soul's lost in theory without a practical base. That same problem is the root of Rand Paul's comments about Civil Rights. He is against slavery and racial bias but to ban the possibility, is a greater sin, in Senator Paul's mind, even if the people not belonging to his group get screwed by his freedom. We are existing in a time of great imbalance. It was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson who named that imbalance that we always called: being "between a rock and a hard place." He called it a "double bind" and described a whole methodology to it. I actually believe that what he describes, is the root of most theater and the issues of consonance and dissonance in music. The root of the word "insane" is both "unbalanced" and "blocked." Playing with those tools in Art and working out their resolution gives great fulfillment and pleasure. But in Art no one gets hurt by your personal self development while everyone is entertained. The same is not true in the mega systems of politics and economics where we all become guinea pigs on a regular basis and lives are alternately ruined or robbed of personal meaning. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Rattle Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 2:11 PM To: INCOME DISTRIBUTION EDUCATIONRE-DESIGNING WORK Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: How Youth-Led Revolts Shook World's Elites please excuse the self-promotion - blog post links the equality issue with ICTs, their distributive properties, and the emerging cooperative, egalitarian and sustainable global structures. http://computingourwaytoparadise.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/british-roits-icts -and-neoliberalism-a-cure-worse-than-the-cause-or-disaster-capitalism/ --- On Sun, 8/14/11, Sally Lerner <[email protected]> wrote: From: Sally Lerner <[email protected]> Subject: [Futurework] FW: How Youth-Led Revolts Shook World's Elites To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Received: Sunday, August 14, 2011, 12:31 PM ________________________________________ From: Portside Moderator [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2011 2:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: How Youth-Led Revolts Shook World's Elites How Youth-Led Revolts Shook Elites around the World From Athens to Cairo and Spain to Santiago, old certainties are being challenged after the Arab spring and financial crises By Jack Shenker Guardian (UK) August 12, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/12/youth-led-revolts-shook-world Of all the millions of words expended in the global media on this year's rash of youth-led revolts across the globe, none are more relevant than those penned by Alex Andreou, a Greek-born blogger who now lives in Britain. "You have run out of ideas," he wrote in June, echoing the message of Greek protesters to their country's political and economic elites. "Wherever in the world you are, that statement applies." Andreou was writing as the occupation of Syntagma Square - Athens's central plaza - was entering its fourth week, and he went on to summarise what had moved Greek demonstrators to take to the streets: a refusal to suffer any further in order to make the rich even richer, a withdrawal of consent and trust from the politicians governing in their name, and finally that simplest and most devastating of censures from one generation to the next. Those in power, he said, were devoid of fresh thinking, and this is why "the protests in Greece affect all of you directly". When the dust has settled on 2011 perhaps the aspect of it that will prove most striking to historians is that in a period where so many old certainties dissolved, from the stability of dictatorships in the Middle East to the sturdiness of the neoliberal economic framework in Europe, America and beyond, those with their hands on the levers of formal power had so few ideas to offer. From Arab autocrats to eurozone finance ministers, paucity of original thought has prevailed at the top and the prescription has always been more of the same: reheated rhetoric and stencil-cut solutions, all worn lifeless with weary familiarity. Little wonder then that from Santiago to Sana'a, something else has arisen to fill the void - and that those still rooted in the old models of thinking find themselves lacking the linguistic tools necessary to even describe the phenomenon, never mind understand it. A "global temper tantrum" is the most historian and empire cheerleader-in-chief Niall Ferguson could muster in his effort to characterise this year's developments, which have seen hundreds of thousands in north Africa, led by the young, braving bullets to topple entrenched regimes. Meanwhile in southern Europe, South America, Wisconsin and London, city centres have been occupied and youths have mobilised, challenging existing power structures and fighting - with messy, uneven consequences - to articulate an alternative. We are witnessing, says Priyamvada Gopal, an English professor at Cambridge, the "momentary transformation of anger from a dirty word into the very currency of political exchange". Each of these struggles has been specific to local contexts but they share more than just the imagery of occupied squares, tents and teargas. They are bound together by a common sense of disenfranchisement and the belief that the participants have it in them to create a new reality - and that at the moment, largely inspired by the Arab spring and the global economic meltdown, a window of opportunity to do so is open. "The repression is brutal . and the teargas stronger than ever," says Camila Vallejo, president of the Chilean University student union which has brought 100,000 students on to the streets and taken control of 300 schools in an attempt to rebuild the country's education system from scratch - holding mass kissathons and Michael Jackson dance routines in the process. "We have been protesting not about reform, but about wholesale restructuring . if we don't have real change now, it's not going to happen." The scope of her ambition echoes that found in Syntagma Square, where opposition to an EU/IMF bailout and its accompanying austerity measures has morphed into a broader critique of social injustice. "We are ordinary people, we are like you," reads the mission statement of the Real Democracy website - the online hub of the Syntagma protests - before going on to explore the alienation many Greeks feel from the organs of the state. "Without us none of this would exist, because we move the world . I am outraged. I think I can change it." It's easy to overstate the linkages; those joining the anti-government uprising in the Syrian town of Hama and los indignados of Barcelona and Madrid are striving to confront very different enemies and are facing wildly dissimilar levels of repression as a result. But connections are apparent, not least in the protesters' rejection of the old terms of debate and a commitment to build something else in response on the streets - a commitment most visible in Cairo's Tahrir Square, where protesters congregated not only to face down the regime but also to prove that an alternative was feasible; the chant ahum ahum ahum, al masryeen ahum ('here, here, here, the Egyptians are here) was a snub to Hosni Mubarak, but also a reminder that the contours of society were being reimagined from the ground upwards. Elites have yet to grasp that hunger for meaningful grassroots change and the desire to reclaim agency over a future that appears depressingly predetermined, be it under the crony capitalism and police brutality of Middle Eastern despots or the more sanitised platter of unemployment and austerity being handed down by governments in the west. Those on the other side of the divide have been unable to keep pace with the rapid shift in thinking; in his analysis, Ferguson adopts the kind of paternalistic tone that came easily to Mubarak as the octogenarian gently chided Egypt's youth for daring to question his authority, or to the unelected rating agency chiefs who condemn whole nations to poverty with a sad shake of the head and a well- intentioned finger-wag against spending profligacy. "Historically in any country and in any context it's young people who are at the core of protests," says Gopal. "But at this moment in history we're seeing a shared sense of deprivation among the young, a shared sense of there being a democracy deficit across the world. In all these places neoliberal economic policies have intensified their hold and affected young people most directly, young people looking for employment, study, prospects. I think it has cut young people to the bone, and they're confronting it directly." Two other common motifs run through this year's rebellions. First has been the collapse in authority of traditional institutions; from Mubarak's cult of personality to the seemingly incessant scandals engulfing Britain's arbiters of political, financial and cultural control - bankers, MPs, and the Murdoch media empire. The crumpling is contagious, fuelling rebellions in the most of places. "People are on the edge, you can't fool us anymore," says Avi Cohen, a 25-year-old drama student who has joined a 2,000-strong tent protest on Tel Aviv's exclusive Rothschild Avenue. The protesters say they are campaigning for social justice, leaving the question of Palestinian injustice off the table for now in an effort to build the broadest possible consensus. Like many of his counterparts elsewhere, Rotem Tsbueri has lost faith in the official mechanisms of political reform. "We're not interested in changing ministers or governments, we want to change the way things are done. It's not about who's in the government, it's about the way they work and think." The 15-M movement in Spain, which organised demonstrations in 58 cities earlier this year under the slogan "they don't represent us", embodies a similar yearning for a new political framework to arise. "We don't want to form a political party because it would destroy the horizontal nature of the movement," says Carlos Pederes, an IT worker who has been involved in the protests from the beginning. "[Plus] the system is rigged so that only the two big parties can win, so it would be pointless." The second commonality has been the tools used to mobilise dissent. Although the role of online social media in the Arab uprisings has often been overstated, there can be no doubt that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have enabled diverse groups to quickly garner broad support for acts of resistance - and that this means of communication has coloured the internal organisation of protest movements. "One of the most unifying aspects between our own organisation and other movements around the world is that we're relatively non-hierarchical and decentralised," says Steve Taylor, a campaigner with UK Uncut. "Today there may not be a single unifying ideology of change among global youth protests of the sort that united people in 1968, but there is a common ideology embedded within our shared model of organisation - no egos, no celebrities, no one telling anyone else what to do and no one willing to take orders - one that lends itself to online social media and has captured people's imaginations." The bonds between 2011's islands of youth dissent remain limited. Although the root causes of anger may be similar, the levels of politicisation among those expressing that anger vary wildly; Gopal says she was struck by the diffuseness and lack of direction in the recent British riots, contrasting it with protests in the Arab world, where "a focus and self-awareness that comes from those countries' recent history of anti- colonial struggle has been transmitted from one generation to the next". But this year could still be remembered as one in which, after many decades of moribund political and economic realities, a new narrative began to form. As Andreou points out, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the philosopher who coined the term "Black Swan event" - denoting a hugely consequential event that is utterly unpredictable and can only be explained afterwards - was recently asked by Jeremy Paxman whether the violence on the streets of Athens fell into that category. He demurred - and said that the real Black Swan event was that more people weren't rioting elsewhere. Additional reporting by Jonathan Franklin in Santiago, Stephen Burgen in Barcelona and Harriet Sherwood in Tel Aviv ___________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: [email protected] Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3 Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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